Commentaire 8 – commentaires et rétroaction

Gary Norris

The Proposal of the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission, arriving without publicity in the media dog days of summer, seems unobjectionable (within its terms of reference) except for one change – the renaming of the constituency in which I happen to live, Parkdale-High Park, to become Taiaiako'n-High Park.

Points of objection:

• Parkdale has been represented under that name in the House of Commons for more than a century, since the consequential election of 1917. It is an established, firmly defined and vibrant district of the city, and there has been no noticeable discussion of a name change.
• Taiaiako'n, inasmuch as it has any intelligible geographic meaning, appears to refer to an indigenous encampment along the Humber River, the western boundary of the riding - far west of High Park and even farther from Parkdale.
• It's reasonable to conjecture that many more Parkdale constituents fluently speak, for example, Tibetan than whichever indigenous language generated Taiaiako'n. (And what about the several other aboriginal tongues that claim this region of Turtle Island?)
• Pronunciation of Taiaiako'n is problematic to speakers of either official language. Encountering it in print is puzzling, starting with guessing the appropriate sound of the repeated ai. The apostrophe apparently denotes a widely unfamiliar and inconvenient glottal plosive.
• The commission's imposition of an indigenous name on a long-established riding seems poignantly dissonant given that Stormont-Dundas-Glengarry is to retain its commemoration of Henry Dundas. Leaving aside whether the demonization of Viscount Melville is historically simplistic, the constituency renaming exercise arrives a year after Toronto City Council voted 17-7 to rename Dundas Street (a major thoroughfare in Parkdale-High Park and the rest of the city) because of his supposed role in prolonging the slave trade.

Overall, this initiative from the Ministry of Meaningless Gestures seems designed to tip reasonable, well-meaning people into resigned resentment, choking on their glottal stops – and for less reasonable and well-meaning people it offers a new handle for outrage.

Progressive and well-thought-out change is one thing: an abrupt piece of performative exertion whose sole identifiable purpose is to give a warm feeling to a cadre of reconciliation bureaucrats and activists is a different and probably counterproductive thing.

Regards,

Gary Norris